Evolution as Related to Religious Thought. 333 



Power to which no limit in time or space is conceivable, and 

 that all the phenomena of the universe are, whether they 

 be what we call material or what we call spiritual phenom- 

 ena, manifestations of this Infinite and Eternal Power.*' 

 Whatever fulness and richness of statement there is here 

 that we seem to miss in Spencer's reconciliation of science 

 and religion, there is nothing that has not come ont in sub- 

 sequent expansions of his thought. And surely there is no 

 lack of knowledge here. We cannot know anything aright 

 without knowing it of God. The old claim of theology to 

 be Scientia Scientiarum, the science of the sciences, was 

 never made so good before as it is now. And it is what 

 we know that makes the vast Unknown the boundless con- 

 tinent of religious sentiment and aspiration. What makes 

 the vast Unknown so quickening to our awe, our gladness 

 and our trust is that what we do know is so wonderful, so 

 marvelous, and we proceed to people all the great Unknown 

 with the benignant forms and forces that have been openly 

 revealed to us. When Charles Lamb was fifteen and Mary 

 twenty-six, they saw the sea for the first time, and were not 

 a little disappointed, because they expected to see "all the 

 sea at once, the commensurate antagonist of the earth." 

 But when Ave stand on the sea-shore, is it, as he said, only 

 "a slip of salt-water" that we see ? or only 



"Eastward as far as the eye can see 

 Eastward, Eastward endlessly 

 The sparkle and tremor of purple sea" ? 



It may be all we see, it is not all we feel. Surely what fills 

 us with a joy so keen that it is almost pain is not alone 

 the flashing tumult of the great expanse of waters ; it is 

 also that, beyond where sky and w r ater meet, with the mind's 

 eye we see the ocean reaching on and on, beautiful with 

 the same unspeakable beauty that lies within our field of 

 actual vision. It is the beauty of the known that makes 

 the beauty of the Unknown so sure and so entrancing. And 

 just as surely the soul's normal delight in the infinite God 

 is not produced by any merely negative unknown. No more 

 is it by any positive known. No, but by the warrantable 

 conviction that all the infinite unknown is, equally with 

 what we know, the haunt of beauty, order and majestic 

 law. 



Known as an infinite and eternal energy, known as the 



